Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday January 27, 2012 @03:01PM
from the its-doing-science-and-its-still-alive dept.

New submitter el borak writes
"Never mind all the talk about the revival of the American auto industry. What may be the greatest car the U.S. has ever built is currently a tidy 78 million miles (125m km) away from this world — resting on the edge of Endeavour crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars. It was on January 25, 2004 that the rover Opportunity bounced down on Mars for a mission designed to last a minimum of three months and a maximum of just a year or two."

Can you remember the last piece of technology hardware you had which outlived its warranty? For me, most of that was stuff made in the 80's.

Considerable accomplishment, designing, accumulating all the bits, assembling it, putting it in a rocket, flying it to Mars, landing it and having it muck about in a place without AAA Roadside Service. Well done.

Can you remember the last piece of technology hardware you had which outlived its warranty?.

Pretty much everything I own, seeing as how most warranty terms are a year at best. No company in its right mind would design a product that would NOT make it past its warranty expiration.

You don't read the same reviews I do, on Amazon... "This thing was DOA out of the box..." "This lasted 30 days and then died..." etc.

Some stuff holds up well (which I theorize is inversely proportional to how much I use/depend upon) While I experience the same as these unhappy reviewers.

After the learning experiences of Hubble and the failed ("inches? I thought you mean't Centimetres!") Mars Climate Orbiter, you can expect things are held to a very high standard - because failure is so very, very expens

Still, we had a visitor to our local Astronomy club explain the one oversight which may ultimately doom Opportunity - dust build up on the Solar Panels. Next probe will probably have a little robotic arm and brush to sweep itself off now and then.

This wasn't an oversight, it was well understood that this would happen. They've gotten lucky that dust devils have cleaned the panels a few times.

The next Mars rover is nuclear powered. There are no attempts at any kind of dust cleaning device- it would be far too heavy and fragile to be worth bothering with.

This wasn't an oversight, it was well understood that this would happen. They've gotten lucky that dust devils have cleaned the panels a few times.

Hell, they originally thought the wind would be completely negligible, and the dust build-up that would result had in that case was the whole reason for the 90 day mission plan. So, yeah, they kinda anticipated the whole dust thing.

Isn't it nice when being wrong is a pleasant surprise? And hey, learning that kind of thing about the planet is part of why we're sending robots there. It all fits together nicely.

One does have to be a bit brain-damaged to confuse the statistically small number of devices which fail upon first use with the overall population in which the vast majority last the full warranty period, and a smaller majority last twice that period or longer.

While I don't own anything manufactured since 2000 which has more than a dozen years of use behind it, that's due to temporal mathematics, not engineering shortcuts.

It may be statistically small, but folks like me are also statistically unlucky (five dead hard drives in one year, zero laptops that made it out of warranty before their first failure, a Roomba whose motor gears broke the third time I used it—out of warranty, but only because I didn't use it enough—and a car at 110k that has a rebuilt transmission, a new starter gear on the front of the transmission, a rebuilt power steering pump, a rebuilt steering rack, new seals throughout the top half of th

Maybe he has been on the internet for too long and has lost all hope in humanity.It is ok though. If he hangs on another 3 or 4 years he will become perfectly ok with the knowledge that the human race really sucks.

You don't read the same reviews I do, on Amazon... "This thing was DOA out of the box..." "This lasted 30 days and then died..." etc.

Oh, I read those all the time, and they're typically on cheap made-in-china shit that give everlasting life to the term "you get what you pay for". Once you come to terms with the fact that cheapest is rarely best, and start making small investments instead of purchases, your experience will be much better. I can honestly say I have not received anything that has been DOA in longer than I can remember, and the only thing I've had to file a warranty claim on in the past decade has been my Xbox 360. Not to sa

You don't read the same reviews I do, on Amazon... "This thing was DOA out of the box..." "This lasted 30 days and then died..." etc.

To be honest, most of those are probably lies. While it's true some are damaged during shipping, it's far more likely that:

* The user bought it, disliked it, and wanted a refund but couldn't get one (remember, you can leave an Amazon review without buying it from Amazon). The only recourse is to break it and claim DOA or "it broke".

I would guess that customers receiving faulty goods are more likely to post feedback than the customers who were happy with their purchase.

From my own experience, if I'm not happy with a purchase, I generally want to have a good moan about the supplier / manufacturer and let everyone else know about it too. On the flip side, when I am perfectly happy with my purchase, I sometimes leave good feedback but generally am too engrossed playing with my new toy to bother doing so.:)

Can you remember the last piece of technology hardware you had which outlived its warranty?

Sure, my camera (Canon T2i) just passed it's warranty date a few weeks and it's still going strong. So is my 2005 era Kodak point-and-shoot. Heck, the computer I'm typing this on (an off-the-shelf at Best Buy HP Pavilion) is still going strong on it's original OS installation after nearly six years. (It's companion is a year younger and has only required the mouse to be replaced, unsurprising on a machine primarily

My Kodak DC4800 with 3.1 Mpixels is soon to be 12 years old and works fine. I wish my 2003 32" Sony CRT television would die so I can justify a modern set but it will probably last 20 years. I also have a Sony digital clock radio (with analog AM/FM tuner) that we're still using that is 22 years old.

Yeah, we kept waiting for our eight year old CRT TV to die so we could replace it with a flatscreen/HDTV. This last Black Friday there was such a good deal at Costco that we finally just bit the bullet and upgraded.

Makes you wonder, when people say we can't do that for consumer vehicles, eh? Where's the Can-do spirit?!?

You could, it just costs more. That said, most US made vehicles will run 100K miles with minimal supervision. My 12 year old GMC truck has really been quite reliable and could well run another 10 years. I'm part owner of a 40 year old plane that could fly for another 40 years.

Makes you wonder, when people say we can't do that for consumer vehicles, eh? Where's the Can-do spirit?!?

You could, it just costs more. That said, most US made vehicles will run 100K miles with minimal supervision. My 12 year old GMC truck has really been quite reliable and could well run another 10 years. I'm part owner of a 40 year old plane that could fly for another 40 years.

Not everything is an iPad.

To be fair, with airplanes, hours the engine has run and takeoff/landing cycles are more important than age. Of course, being an aircraft owner, you probably already know this.

Some can handle a lot of both. There's a couple of DC3 aircraft that still fly out of South Africa to Antarctica every year that look a lot like the ski-equipt DC3 in the 1953 movie "The Thing From Outer Space". They have different engines and a portion in front of the wing removed and replaced to make them a bit longer, but they are still very old aircraft being used like trucks.

Are you nuts... things made in the 80s where a lot more unreliable. You have natural selection bias. Everything you still have from the 80s still alive is the sample you draw your conclusion. Objects have become a lot more reliable and cost less money.

Can you remember the last piece of technology hardware you had which outlived its warranty?

I'm not senile YET. I'm working on an old PC for a friend who was given an old Dell with a 500 mz chip, 256 meg memory and Windows XP. The only thing wrong with it is whoever owned it before was dumb enough to load it down with crap, including 5 different AVs. The hardware is working fine (just reinstalled Windows for him, it still had the disks).

I bought my TV in 2002. My car was five years old when I bought it in 20

1) IT did not actually put those 78 Million miles on its own hardware, its like if I ship a toyota from japan to virgina, I did not DRIVE it from A to B and I shure as hell would not add the shipping mileage to its odometer

2) Are we really that proud that something we built lasted 8 years? that's like the breaking in period for a diesel Mercedes with far more (actual, not shipping) miles on it

2) Are we really that proud that something we built lasted 8 years? that's like the breaking in period for a diesel Mercedes with far more (actual, not shipping) miles on it

Eight years, in an extremely inhospitable environment (extreme dust, an average temperature of -60C), with absolutely zero maintenance. Yeah, let's see that Mercedes run for 8 years with no oil change.

A break-in period that consisted of being shipped slowly on a ship compared to a violent launch on the top of a rocket, as well as the re-entry into the atmosphere of a largely mysterious planet, and finally the potentially violent landing.

Then, once in use and with the odometer actually ticking up, the Mercedes gets an oil change every few thousand miles, or every few months; it's also refueled probably every other week, at least. And it's probably not in a hostile environment the entirety of its driven life, at least without serious repair assistance.

So, yes, we really should be proud of the Opportunity for lasting for eight years while 78 million miles from a repair shop.

The impressive aspect is not that it has operated for 8 years, or that it is "beyond its warranty" (which is a misnomer - there was no warranty). What is impressive is that it has operated in a harsh environment for 8 years WITH ZERO MAINTENANCE! None. No one has touched the device in over 8 years now. And it has continued to operate, by radio, despite dust, vibration, heat, cold and radiation beyond what most Earth-bound devices ever experience.

Sure, my car has well over 100K miles on it and is over 12 years old. But it is only operating because I am performing routine maintenance on the car. If I had not maintained the car, it would have stopped working ages ago. The impressive aspect of the Mars rover is that it has survived without anyone needs to tighten a nut, change oil, replace a battery or wheel or any of the routine operations that we have to use for our normal machines to keep them operational.

In fairness (and not to diminish your point -- it is astonishing) there are several things on the rover that have pretty much bit the dust. They keep tweaking things to work around the breaking down hardware. Were the rover your car you'd have replaced a lot of it a long time ago because it's barely hobbling along.

That said, you're quite right it's an phenomenal achievement and the lessons learned will make/have made future missions even more amazing.

It's the constant thermal change that's effecting its life. 8 Years is nothing to scoff at. However, I am curious to know how many miles/kilometers this thing traveled in total. I doubt its as much as we think it is. This vehicle must rest in-between charge cycles I'm sure. Also, the #1 killer of any electro-mechanical device is moisture. Although the martian atmosphere is 100% saturated with water, it's so thin that its actually bone dry in comparisons with even the driest deserts here on Earth.

Endeavor Crater where it is very close to now is about 17 km (11 miles) from the point Opportunity landed. But the actual travel path was not a straight line, so the actual total travel is probably on the order of 20 or 25 km.

I keep hearing about this mission, and I'd like to start a movement that part of the MSR mission will be to retrieve the rover from Mars and bring it back to Earth for evaluation, because I believe that examination of the rover after surviving for so long beyond it's original design lifetime will be very educational.

This was the cheapest mission to Mars we've ever done. That is a fact. That the rovers lasted this long means we got a lot more out of our money than we thought. You're not knocking NASA engineers, but you are, and you're doing it by omitting a few key facts.

They designed these things to withstand the worst environment they could imagine and be as durable as possible since maintenance would be impossible. Maybe they overcompensated, so what? In return they got 4x the lifetime and dozens of times the science that they had hoped for, and still counting. Your complaint is idiotic. It's like complaining there's too much cake.

The point of engineering is to have "just enough cake." Not too much (overdesign), not too little (underdesign).

But now imagine your equipment is going somewhere that you know very little about (this being the whole point of why you're sending it), and there is no possibility for repair, upgrade (outside of software), or second chances.

Now are you going to aim for "just enough", or are you going to err on the side of over-design? How are you going to determine what "just enough" is, when you don't know what the environment will be like?

The correct way to engineer something like the Mars rover was not to try to make

"In the mining industry, where safety is paramount. They typically have entire redundant control systems to ensure no downtime. The systems are designed to last 20-30 years but get replaced every 5 years to make sure that nothing goes wrong ever."

Why not build systems to last 100, 1,000 or even 100,000 years if you care so much about safety? Because 100,000 reliability, even to the non-engineer, sounds like overkill. But you yourself, as an engineer, claim that

I think it is great that the device was design to last max a year or two, and lasted 8, but on the flipside, this means they aren't really good engineers. How can I say this? The estimates were off by 400%~800%!!! Or more!!!

Estimates were based on experience with the earlier Sojourner rover. Opportunity got lucky in that every now and then whirlwinds clean off the solar panels. This phenom was not known at the time, at least with solar panels.

And the wheels and joints have become creaky and are gradually failing. Work-arounds and adjustments to behavior have allowed it to continue. Thus, the equipment is failing, as expected. Luck and ingenuity in work-arounds should not normally be relied on for engineering duration estimates. Further, the grinder teeth have worn down and the rover is basically gumming rocks, or just brushing rocks instead of grinding.

It may be dumb luck. What you have to keep in mind is that the margin of error necessary might be so high that even a good engineer cannot narrow it down to a small number. In this case, it could be the durability necessary to get the rover to run for a month is the exact same durability that would allow it to run for years.

The rover's aren't like the Deacon's Masterpiece [wikisource.org], where every component reaches end-of-life at exactly the same time, the mission life was dictated not by component life but environmental factors. As I understand it, the relatively short life-rating was based largely on power availability. From all previous Mars landers, it was expected that the solar panels' output would drop to useless levels within a couple months of landing. And although they surely had some ideas on how to get the rovers to survive the Martian winter, they certainly weren't going to make that a mission requirement. The mission life wasn't a matter of the rated life of the motors, or the computers, or of the fatigue life of the chassis. You couldn't have really made them cheaper and still had a usable rover: a strut with a fatigue life of only a few months' driving probably may have snapped on impact, a 1-year motor would have been more or less the same size and weight, a 1-year computer would have been identical to the computer they've got.

And, really, why would you want to shave everything down to such a short life: it's not like you could have saved much money for the taxpayer - the component cost of the rovers is only maybe 1/100th the total cost of the mission. Most of the cost is in getting the rover to Mars in the first place, followed by having a full-time staff of dozens or hundreds designing, testing, and running the thing.

That's exactly what was cooking in my head, but never heard of it before: Deacon's Masterpiece. Yes! I was actually thinking in my head, the perfect engineering solution would be one that last exactly the allotted time then disintegrates, at optimal cost. I didn't know there was a term for it.

I like the next step in the discussion, the statement: "the strut that lasts a few months' time, but would snap on impact." Does this mean that the most perfectly "Deaconized" subgroups/subcomponents cannot be asse

There was a bare minimum that this rover had to be engineered for. That bare minimum to make sure it worked at all is what also allowed it to last as long as it has.

This rover landed via airbags and experienced some tremendous g-forces. The rover had to be designed to survive that, just the ability to scoot around after that in a low gravity environment was cake compared to the landing.

So if they had designed this to just barely hit the 90 day limit then it might not have survived at all.

This was how the project got off the ground.
If it was expected to last 10 years, the budget would have
looked too large, and the pencil pushers would have killed
the project.
Leave the techs alone, and good stuff happens.

I think it is great that the device was design to last max a year or two, and lasted 8, but on the flipside, this means they aren't really good engineers.

First of all it was engineered to guarantee to work for 3 months which was the allotted project objectives. Based on the budget and capability, this is what NASA had designed the rovers to do. Surviving for years is a bonus.

Just because they erred on the side of a good result doesn't mean the estimates are better. It means their methodology is HEAVILY padded, or if we assume +/-400~800%, they were just lucky that it didn't swing the other way. Given Phobos-Grunt, perhaps space engineering margin of error really is +/-400~800%. Although I suspect huge margins of error were thrown about in NASA>

Of course they padded their estimates and erred on the side of caution. 1) There is no way to retrieve or repair this rover. 2) NASA knew about the sticky dust from previous missions, but they didn't have omnipotence when it comes to the Mars climate. They didn't know that windstorms were capable of cleaning said dust. So you would have rather just wing it and not pad their estimates. So when the rover failed, they can tell NASA "oh well, try again in two years."

If that's the case, huge design buffers, that means they don't understand the underlying physics/materials engineer, and had to heavily overdesign, which means there is a far more efficient design out there.

I don't think you understand that there are different goals in engineering. One goal may be efficiency. The goal in this case was absolute reliability despite any unknowns the rovers may have experienced on Mars.

I'm not knocking NASA engineers, I'm just exploring how to shave down this margin so that they can make more efficient designs at lower cost that behave as expected.

Again efficiency is not as much a priority as reliability in these cases.

Building something that behaves as expected is far, far, FAR more important than building something that blows away expectations by orders of magnitude. The former is good engineering, the latter is waste, or worse, dumb luck!

The engineers never worked on the expectation that you ascribe. People outside of NASA have placed it on them. For them, the mission was successful when the rovers completed their objectives after 3 months. All these years afterwards are bonus.

Within the payload limits, there's no reason not to over-engineer the hell out of a space platform. Value engineering a rover closer to the mission plan would have saved time/money, but would have added to the risks of failure. Utter mission failure is the major cost sink for working in space, so it pays to add sigmas when possible.

The critical variable is the limited number of opportunities for interplanetary launches as a function of time and lining up rockets. NASA could be lofting $1000 Aibos [wikipedia.org] with high

"I think that without being able to examine the vehicles, we cannot tell what or where the failure points will be."

I agree, some of the other comments explain that this is a "point and shoot" mission, without a chance to inspect the design for further engineering feedback. Someone else posted about a think called "Deacon's Masterpiece" in response to my over/under design statement, which is where I was headed. But like you said, without examining it, other engineering methods need to be employed.

The main reason something like the rovers were vastly over engineered was specifically due to lack of knowledge and experience. Remember the original Viking landers did not move so NASA had little experience with mobile rovers. Mars Pathfinder had the Sojourner rover but it never moved very far from the base station. This was the first time that NASA was deploying a true rover. As more missions are deployed engineers are using this experience as NASA and the JPL would love to put more instruments on the

Not because it goes against the grain here at/. , but because these fucking morons are posting it in every single fucking story.

Most individuals would have given up by now, perhaps figured their point got across, but this troll just keeps on posting on and on, in every single fucking thread, every single one. Just like those fucking annoying people who post advertisements in the middle of threads.

And that is exactly what the troll wants.Just don't feed the trolls, and they will die in painful death.(To be honest I am feeding him now as well, so I promise that is my first and last post on this topic)

My friend, please seek a mental health institution immediately. You are spouting the same drivel about prophesy as you have here [slashdot.org] I can only surmise that you are in need of immediate assistance.